Abstract:

The essay explores the public social dimension of the great cultural essays as a popular post-socialist genre. It looks into the genre s emergence and popularity as part of the making of a middleclass taste in contemporary China and its claim to a re-imagined cultural national inheritance. In particular, the discussion focuses on the example of essayist Yu Qiuyu and examines the implications of his successful transformation of an obsolete historical Culture into a desirable commodity that offers spiritual home to the aspiring and successful of a Greater China .